Premiership Review (26th-27th Nov)

Alan Parry thinks Stoke City are unfairly maligned. He said as much on Saturday morning during their match with Blackburn (who played in an away kit designed to resemble a yellow five-a-side bib, as teams of workmates and drinking friends across the nation noted the comparison, wounded). I suspect that a lot of Stoke City fans would have sympathy with that view. After all, what further evidence do they need of the nation’s disdain for them beside the fact that Alan Parry, very much Sky’s ‘bits and pieces’ man, is a regular at their televised fixtures? Not just Parry, either, they always seem to get one of the lesser spotted summarisers, the ones they seem to turn to only after several others have discovered, with dubious haste, arrangements they simply can’t break.

Don Goodman was the pundit. His crimes ranged from the minor if irritating old favourites- who, by now, doesn’t know that the ball touching an opposition player on its way through the striker is not enough to play the striker onside?- to the slightly more unusual: imploring Scott Dann to get forward near the end of the first forty five minutes rather seemed to suggest that he had forgotten altogether about the second half. I don’t think anybody who still considers the second half something of a staple will be accused of being a stick in the mud, even by Sky Sports. Yet, perhaps hopefully, Goodman seemed to believe that he could be outside with the heating warming the car up as soon as he’d said his goodbyes and remembered where he’d put his coat. And, yes, if somebody were to tell you they forgot entirely the second half from the Stoke/Blackburn game, you would hardly be surprised. But that’s five minutes to twenty four hours after it ended, not before it even starts. It’s no wonder Stoke fans think nobody likes them.

One of the reasons nobody likes them could be deduced from Parry’s reference to what is tactfully being known as “some towel business.” Stoke are fated to be being regarded as the type of club liable to get involved in some towel business. A few weeks ago Newcastle United, calling their bluff, had insisted on equal access to the towels, and this had led to Pulis scraping the service all together for both home and away players. As such, Rory Delap was forced to use his shirt to wipe the ball down before throwing it back in to touch. Parry noted that this was a practice unlikely to please the “laundry lady.” Back in the day, of course, the single laundry lady would most likely have been charged with seeing to both the towels and the shirts, and, as such, largely unmoved about which was being used to get rid of the dew and the errant grass on a Nike Total 90. Stoke, though, are learning that with European qualification, and with it the increased wash load, a rotatable and flexible squad of laundry ladies is a necessity.

There was controversy at Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge. Alex Ferguson’s infantile bleating over a poor penalty call was thrown in to sharp perspective by Sunday’s awful news (*), and, at Stamford Bridge, John Terry was accused of inviting a booking, his fifth of the season, to ‘waste’ his suspension during Tuesday’s Carling Cup tie. Booked for dawdling with the ball at a throw in for what seemed like over a minute, several Chelsea fans have since defended their captain on account of that’s genuinely how slow and ponderous he is these days.

(* Nobody who watched Gary Speed stride through Newcastle United’s 2002-2003 Champions’ League campaign needs to be told what a good player he was. What shines through the tributes is how popular and liked he was off the pitch by pretty much everybody. I never met him, but a friend did in a service station only a month or so ago. Mr. Speed chatted amiably about football with him for about ten minutes- roughly ten minutes longer than I have ever managed to chat amiably about football with that particular friend. A small act of decency, warmth and politeness that Speed most likely never thought anything else about ever again, but a small testament, among much larger ones, to the type of human being he was. RIP.)

Newcastle United 1- 2 Blackburn Rovers

Typical Newcastle United, it’s been said by many following last night’s damp squib at home to Blackburn Rovers, a game which they deservedly lost 2-1. Ruddy typical, if you’re a kindly old man weary to this club’s trajectory; bastard bloody fucking typical, if you’re the young gentleman spitting your ire in to my ear on the metro journey home. But typical all the same.

Consider though, that the typical elements spoken of related to the team building the fans’ hopes up and then dashing them. And, yes, there was a hint of seen all this before as Blackburn scored their second goal from their only attack in the second half and our players looked at one another wearing the irritated expressions of somebody just in from work being informed it’s their turn to walk the dog. But to arrive at this slice of typicality, the fans’ hopes had to be raised in the first place, which they were via a stunning home win against Sunderland and an even more stunning win at The Emirates- neither of which, in performance or result, have exactly typified this club in recent years. The Arsenal result in fact was so impressive that it was marked by a strange feeling of regret that on my first ever visit to that stadium I have immediately rendered every subsequent visit as a let down, it being highly unlikely that we will ever go there again in my life time and pass them to death as we did in large spells on Sunday; it was the sheer antithesis of ‘typical’.

And it’s not as if that Arsenal game was a convoluted dream sequence. A bad result against Blackburn doesn’t scrub that result, nor does it suddenly make us a bad team. But it seems that in this frustrating, and at times outright bewildering, season of two steps forward, one step back our fans our taking the negatives to heart and being too quick to believe it’s the good results that are the confidence tricks.

And, yes, it’s hard to blame them for that when we play as poorly as we did last night. Too many players- Williamson, Simpson, Shola (not fit), Nolan- had terrible games, others like Tiote, Enrique and Collocini played nowhere near the level they’re capable of. Conceding the first goal to Blackburn- Tiote guilty of over confidence, or, if you have aspirations of teaching P.E to timid children, fannying about with the thing inside the box like a nugget- is a nightmare, to do it early in the game a death knell. Earlier in the day, I had insisted at Five a Side that I got to ‘be’ Tiote. My performance was the usual shambolic mixture of over earnest tackling, negligible ball control and dense stupidity. He improved in the second half, but in the first it seemed that rather than Cheick waiting for me to play at his level, he was attempting to meet me halfway.

It was freezing cold and, frankly, the biggest shock of the night was us scoring, Carroll ghosting in and heading it impressively back in to the corner from whence it came. As always, the overriding emotion of watching that man’s football team playing football is to dedicate thanks to a higher being (em, Mike Ashley, in this case) that that man is no longer managing our football club.